Conventionally, team members working on one or more projects within a company may get together in a huddle or micro-meeting on a regular basis to share information, discuss topics, evaluate performance, identify issues and/or solve problems collaboratively. Since the introduction of the huddle, whiteboards have acted as the traditional huddle tool for storing all information collected during the huddle session. However, it may not be possible for all participants in a meeting to be in the same physical location at the same time, which may create a need for modifying the current huddle methodology.
Alternatives to overcome the challenge of gathering team members at different locations for huddle may include the use of one or more collaboration tools such as conference phone calls, video conferences, internet relay chat (IRC), and instant messaging, among others. Nevertheless, the whiteboard is still the most used tool in huddle boards, because these collaboration tools are generic ways to connect people and may not offer a consistent way to be fully engaged in huddles. As a result, all team members must be physically located in the same room in order to be fully engaged in the huddle session.
Additionally, a huddle session may use a set of management tools to keep team members engaged and informed about the content, goals, updates of the huddle, among others. Furthermore, all issues discussed, graphics, charts, provided for the meeting and created during the huddle may provide valuable insight to team members and to senior management.
As remote work becomes increasingly common and in order to continue to realize the benefits of the team huddle, there is a need for systems and methods that may enable remote collaboration between team members of a given project in a virtual huddle environment. Equally important is to provide the team members in a virtual huddle with the set of tools that may make the virtual huddle at least as successful as its physical counterpart.
Conventional approaches to meetings amongst remote users fail address all of the deficiencies of the conventional collaboration tools. A web meeting may allow a user to share a computer desktop with another user in a remote location. But the user must select which application should be presented on the computer desktop, so there is no ability to present a page that has information from multiple sub-applications that are dynamically updated. Further, the user cannot include annotations overlaid on the page that are simultaneously presented to the remote user and also stored with that particular page such that the particular page can be retrieved at a later date along with those annotations.
Moreover, conventional extranets are capable of sharing information from a common source, but these extranets do not offer real-time collaboration through real-time updates and simultaneous displays to other users. Further, these conventional extranets do not utilize sub-applications that dynamically display data associated with users simultaneously accessing the extranet. Conventional computer solutions do not offer the desired collaboration, real-time updating, dynamic presentation of data, and linking of additional content to the displayed data.